Mobile care plan helps patients with kidney stone management

In this video, Jenny Guo, MD, provides an overview of a mobile care plan for kidney stone management that was evaluated in the 2024 American Urological Association Annual Meeting abstract, “Development of a novel mobile health platform for surveillance of kidney stone formers: 6-month preliminary analysis.” Guo is a urology resident at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Transcription:

Please provide an overview of the mobile care plan you and your coauthors developed.

We collaborated with a digital patient care management platform known as GetWell Loop. They're used here at Northwestern throughout the hospital. We specifically partnered with them to create a customized kidney stone mobile health care plan for patients with chronic stones. It incorporates patient-specific data to reinforce dietary management, fluid intake, and medication adherence based on the patient's 24-hour urine collection results. And so we sought to conduct a randomized controlled trial comparing the usage of GetWell Loop to a standardized in-person clinic follow-up. How it worked was the GetWell patients come in for an initial clinic visit, and then the idea is that they won't come back to see us for an entire year. So for the entirety of the 1-year period, they will use the app to monitor and to prevent stone recurrences, whereas the patients in our standardized follow-up pathway come back every 6 months for a visit. Regardless of what group the patient is in, both groups will obtain a 6-month 24-hour urine collection so we can have more quantitative data to see if they are following and adhering to our recommendations. The app itself works through something called a check-in process. The patient will be enrolled into the mobile health plan, and they receive check-ins every 3 months, so a total of 5 check-ins. The check-ins are similar to short surveys, and it'll ask patients questions that are specific to their 24-hour urine collection results. For example, are you low in citrate, and if the patient clicks, "yes," based on their 24-hour urine collection result, then the app will proceed to give them information on dietary and medication changes that they can make. And it also includes monthly reminders for fluid intake, as well as medication reminders to make sure that the patients are taking their medications regularly. On top of that, the app itself is pretty streamlined. It's completely incorporated within the Epic MyChart system. So the patients don't need an extra login; they can easily access GetWell Loop directly through their Epic MyChart, so it's almost like an app within an app. And then from the provider side of things, it's also very streamlined. You don't need an additional login or an app to access like an additional website. It's all within Epic under the dashboard. For those reasons, we thought this was very streamlined, and potentially a good way to monitor these patients.

This transcription was edited for clarity.